The disclosed aspects relate generally to communications between and/or within devices and specifically to methods and systems for reducing interference between NFC communications and other coexisting radio access technology (RAT) based communications.
Advances in technology have resulted in smaller and more powerful personal computing devices. For example, there currently exist a variety of portable personal computing devices, including wireless computing devices, such as portable wireless telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and paging devices that are each small, lightweight, and can be easily carried by users. More specifically, the portable wireless telephones, for example, further include cellular telephones that communicate voice and data packets over wireless networks. Many such cellular telephones are being manufactured with relatively large increases in computing capabilities, and as such, are becoming tantamount to small personal computers and hand-held PDAs. Further, such devices are being manufactured to enable communications using a variety of frequencies and applicable coverage areas, such as cellular communications, wireless local area network (WLAN) communications, near field communication (NFC), etc.
Radio level interference can occur between a Near Field Communication (NFC) based radio and other radios in close proximity (e.g., collocated on the same chip set, same board, etc.) with the NFC radio. Further, current attempts at providing coordinated coexistence are limited by overhead and latencies issues associated with communicating from a host interface (e.g., communication to/from the NFC device or subsystem), up through the application level processor, and to the driver for a coexisting radio access technology (RAT). Such RATs may include, wireless local area network (WLAN) based RATs, wide area network (WAN) based RATs, a Bluetooth (BT) RAT, frequency modulation (FM) based RATs, amplitude modulation (AM) based RATs, etc. Currently, no interface exists to establish direct device level communication and coordination between a NFC controller and other radio subsystems for the purpose of coexistence and interference avoidance. Additionally, NFC polling activities are not synchronized to other RAT activities in a device. This may result in non-optimal power consumption when shared resources such as clocks or power supplies are turned on and off asynchronously by multiple subsystems sharing the resources. Currently, no interface exists to establish direct device level communication and coordination between a NFC controller and other radio subsystems for the purpose of aligning radio activity to optimize platform power consumption.
Thus, improved apparatus and methods for reducing interference between NFC communications and other coexisting RAT based communications may be desired.